Infinite Farmer-Chapter 164: Blight Reptilian Mounds

“It’s pretty lazy.”

I am not.

“It says it’s not, but then it would.” Tulland sighed. “Listen. We have been to a place people don’t usually come back from, and we know about things people usually can’t talk about.”

“Plus our situation was weird,” Necia said. “We were sort of a one-off even for there.”

“I don’t get it.” Yuri really didn’t seem to. “I don’t understand any of what you are saying.”

“The point is that we both have a lot of stuff going on that isn’t going to make sense to you, and wouldn’t be helpful even if you knew. The System isn’t going to cause any problems for anyone. It can’t cause any problems for anyone. But if everyone knew I had it with me, it would cause problems. Lots of conversations like this one that don’t help anything,” Tulland said.

“So why are you telling me?” Yuri asked.

“You’re smart, right?”

Yuri smiled. This was a question she knew the answer to, and she was smart enough not to deny it.

“The smartest.”

“You’d figure it out. You already mostly had. So I figured I wouldn’t waste any of our time making you figure out it, or worry you by hiding it.”

They walked another half mile before Yuri seemed to resolve whatever conflicts she had about disembodied voices in people’s heads and finished the conversation.

“Thanks for the respect.”

“No problem.”

The rest of the trip to the city was fairly uneventful, as things like that went. They ate and slept, put down dungeons, and generally defeated any blighted things they saw. Yuri fed them far more power than either of them needed to do it and proved surprisingly adept at staying out of danger despite not being able to fight well herself. She had a knack for hiding in Necia’s shadow, turning with her and staying out of her way while allowing for whatever club, pitchfork, or hoe was flashing through the space to do its job.

Once they reached the city, that job got easier. Permanent dungeons were a treasure, both in Necia’s world and in this one. The bigger ones were virtually unclearable, and the constant wealth they produced meant there wasn’t a single one anywhere that either Yuri or Necia had heard of that didn’t have a big town of some kind around it, thriving off its produce.

This city was eerie from the moment they set foot in it. The streets were wide, well paved, and lined with shops and stands. The buildings were sturdy and beautiful. But whether made of stone or wood, the life was visibly drained out of almost everything. The wood didn’t droop and the stone still held them up. It was even mostly the right color where the dust hadn’t turned it a duller brown. But something was missing, some facet of health and life that had been sucked out of the whole town.

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And, of course, nobody was there. Even without the drained nature of things, the sheer emptiness of everything would be creepy.

“Why are we eating in the street?” Yuri asked. “There’s a restaurant right over there. With tables.”

Necia responded first. “I don’t want to. I don’t think Tulland does either. It feels like eating on someone’s grave. This whole place is very, very wrong. I just want to get into the dungeon and get out as soon as we can.”

“And we need to hurry,” Tulland said. “To be honest, I’m worried about the dungeon.”

“Even you two must have limits. It’s going to be non-stop fighting for hopefully just under two days. Nobody can push their skills that hard for that long without running low. I’m sure you’d get through, but you’d slow down,” Yuri said.

“Yes. And anything over two days is… bad.” Necia nodded. “Very bad.”

They all had double servings, packing themselves as full of food as they could manage before heading closer to the dungeon. If everything went as poorly as they thought it could, they might not be able to eat for a few days. This would have to last them, at least to the extent they couldn’t cover the loss with hastily chewed briar fruits.

The dungeon itself, Yuri said, wasn’t much to look at. As they drew close, Tulland saw that was a lie in some ways. The building in which the dungeon sat was a monolith that reached higher than he had thought any building could reach, a huge building reaching up towards a high, pointed roof that, from a distance, looked a bit like a sword.

“That’s pretty impressive for something you said wouldn’t be,” Tulland commented.

“The building isn’t the dungeon. You didn’t ask about the building.” Yuri plodded forward towards the main street the building sat on. “You asked about the dungeon, and it’s a real let-down. You spend your entire childhood hearing about the Tranu Crossing dungeon. The greatest people go out to raid it. Everything interesting comes from here or goes here, in this part of the world, unless it goes to the capital. And then you see the dungeon, and…”

“Shh,” Necia said. “Looks like it’s at least impressive enough to guard. What even are those?”

Among the bears and grabbers Tulland had seen before was a third beast, something he couldn’t quite identify by sight.

“Oh. Wow.” Yuri ducked behind the others, dutifully pulling herself out of harm’s way just in case they were spotted and the big, mound-like animals could hit them from a distance. “I didn’t think we’d see those here. Get the System to explain them. I don’t think I can.”

Blight Reptilian Mounds

As an emissary force of the blight, this abomination is a grabber in both form and function because the blight willed it so. At its core, it is something other, a darkness representative of the illness that is the blight, following its mindless commands as it works to render the territories into which the blight wishes to expand more vulnerable.

Almost any animal you can think of has had a giant dungeon version at some point or another, even if it was only in a dungeon that existed for a few hours before being cleared. Bears, wolves, and deer are common enough entries in the list, appearing again and again as a kind of familiar filler that adventurers can gauge their growth against.

This one is rarer, an animal that doesn’t scale up in a way that retains the character of the original. Reptilian mounds are not quite turtles, but represent an alternative to them in the same way a leather-clad warrior offers a faster, more agile alternative to a fully plated knight.

In the wild, they use this speed to escape. The fact that they are so much larger in their dungeon form and use that speed to attack instead changes the entire character of the monster, enough so that it rarely made sense as a level-appropriate challenge in most dungeon monster mixes.

Here, the influence of the blight is strong, strong enough to subvert some dungeon processes for brief moments. The blight has used all those moments to generate these beasts, and has shifted them all to the exterior of the dungeon, like guards. Dealing with them will be your first and perhaps greatest challenge, the potential main obstacle in your way before you reach your goal.

Adventurers should be advised that due to current difficulties in energy flow on this world, the dungeon will remain closed and unreplaced until said difficulties are resolved, at which point it will be a simple enough matter to place a dungeon here or elsewhere in compensation.

It’s being awfully wordy today, isn’t it? This world’s System, I mean.

I believe it’s being kind, or at least helpful. Systems are often allowed to share some level of their rationale in how they work, and it’s stretching the rules totell you more than it normally would.

Nice of it.

In your way of speaking, its rear is also on the line. This planet is not in good shape. You are perhaps the best bet it has.

“You are doing it again,” Yuri said. “The thinking-talking.”

“Is that a problem?” Tulland asked.

“Only because those turtles are moving.”

They were not exactly turtles, but they were moving just as reported. They weren’t slow. Their legs lashed out against the ground like big flattened tree trunks, driving them forward and skidding across the ground at a velocity Tulland wouldn’t have thought possible if one of them wasn’t coming right at him like a boulder rolling down a hill. Before he could get further along in his thought process than a vague desire to be anywhere else, Necia was in front of him.

“Get moving!”

That was all she had the time to say before the reptile hit her shield, taking the full brunt of its own very potent force as reflective damage. Something odd happened then. Necia’s levels were enough that she was hurt by the collision, but these were still not monsters of The Infinite, and it was within the range of things she could handle. The unshelled turtle, however, did not have the luxury of simply taking the hit and stumbling away like she did. It was just too large to get out of the way of its own force, which rippled back through it.

The blight infected enemies they killed tended to turn into some kind of smoky vapor, but it took a second or two after they accumulated fatal damage for it to happen. Here, in this case, it was a second longer than it took for the entire animal to break apart into huge, meaty chunks which flew like cannonballs when released from the bounds of the heavier body they had once been a part of. In the process of coming to a rest and finally vaporizing, they took out several smaller individual monsters who were still milling around.

“Neat.” Yuri tapped Necia’s back, transmitting a small spark of power. “Let’s do that again.”